Game Changer: Henry Ford

You would need to be a maverick to become the world’s most successful manufacturer of motorised vehicles in a world that didn’t particularly like ‘horseless carriages’, and Henry Ford certainly was that.

Ford was born into a farming family on July 30, 1863 but left home at 16 to find industrial work. He began with Westinghouse servicing steam engines before acquiring a fascination for internal combustion.

By the age of 24 he had produced his own four-cycle gasoline engine and four years later had built a crude four-wheeled vehicle. By 1896 while working for Thomas Edison he built the Ford Quadricycle and was introduced to backers who could see potential in Ford’s designs.

However, it would take until 1904 and after Ford drove another of his designs to a record 146.9km/h on a frozen lake that the brand became successful.

During 1906, Ford produced almost 9000 cars and a year later the annual tally topped 14,000, but Henry wasn’t even close to satisfied.

1908 brought the Model T, which was described by famed artist Norman Rockwell, who devoted a series of paintings to Ford’s memory, as the car that ‘put the world on wheels’.

Its design had been undertaken in secret, upstairs in the Ford factory while production of the Model N continued underneath. Henry Ford had suffered previous issues with doubting business partners and didn’t want to reveal the car until he knew its relatively radical concept worked.

The crankcase was made from durable vanadium steel, the transmission was a two-pedal epicyclic system of gears and belts which Ford likened to riding a bicycle.

The cars would be constructed not one at a time but on a production line where incomplete vehicles would roll past ‘stations’ at which various parts were installed.

As Ford learned more about production efficiencies, the cost of his cars came down and he reduced prices to promote sales.

The first Model Ts cost $US865 but by 1925 a later version of the five-seat Touring Car was priced at $US290, plus $65 for an electric starter.

From 17,700 sales during its first production year, the Model T expanded its market to exceed 300,000 annually by 1914 and 1.3 million by 1921. After 1909, Ford only made the one car but in many different styles, from two-seat roadsters to light trucks.

If the T Model was quirky then the Model A that followed was remarkably conventional. By then though, Ford was all about making money and ensuring that outside suppliers didn’t syphon off funds that Henry believed were rightfully his.

Continued success was fuelled by vertical integration, whereby Ford would own coal and iron ore mines and the ships that carried raw materials to company steel mills. As for his source of timber body framing, Ford had forests planted and to make windows he established a glass factory.

When sales slumped during World War I, Ford was sued by the Dodge Brothers, who despite being rivals remained Ford shareholders, to stop him investing dividends back into the company.

In response, he outlaid an extraordinary $US106 million to buy the Dodge holding and several other minority investors who disagreed with his methods.

While in his 70s and after successfully launching a mainstream V8, Henry effectively handed control of the company to his son Edsel, who had battled his father for 20 years to modernise the company’s products.

Edsel died in 1943 of cancer and a frail Ford Senior resumed control of the business before transferring it to his grandsons. Henry Ford passed away in 1947 at the age of 83 after a life of extraordinary influence on an automotive industry in its infancy.